In January 4, 2017, Premier Li Keqiang attended a symposium on overcapacity industry, he said, China hasn't been able to produce die steel, like ballpoint pens, which require import.
From the true sense, the ball on the pen "ball" is not "stainless steel", but the hardness after the diamond tungsten carbide, tungsten is also the main raw material for the production of mold steel.
The ball pen of early ballpoint pen is made of ordinary steel. It is exposed to acid ink for a long time and is easy to corrode. It affects the writing effect and service life. In 1957, Parker, a famous pen maker of America, introduced T-ball instead of Jotter for ball point pen, and used tungsten carbide as the pen bead. By 1950s, the technology and process of tungsten carbide prepared by powder metallurgy method have been relatively mature. Many pen makers in the world have followed Parker's company to produce ballpoint pens with tungsten carbide. France's Bic Corporation was originally made of stainless steel and converted to tungsten carbide in 1961. It has continued to this day, forming a perfect and rigorous process.
The manufacturing process of tungsten carbide ball NIB needs more than 20 steps. In general, the spherical beads with a diameter of 1mm were firstly prepared by powder metallurgy method, and then hardened in the furnace. The ball was then put into a lapping machine and added with a lubricant and a small amount of diamond dust paste. After 5 days of grinding, the ball was smooth and shaped. Finally, by screening and testing qualified ball was installed to the seat on the pen head.
Although it is a seemingly insignificant "bead", but the manufacturing is very fine, now, with the development of material science, tungsten carbide has many new competitors, especially the development of new ceramic materials, such as zirconia toughened ceramics (ZTC), China has made a great breakthrough in the development of new materials. It is said that this kind of material is not only inferior to tungsten carbide, but also has better ink holding ability, but compared with tungsten carbide. Because of its manufacturing cost, ZTC is limited to the manufacture of high-grade ball point pens, and the main ball point pen material is made of tungsten carbide.
At present, the international ball point head production equipment is mainly produced in Switzerland. Ball point pen "steel" material is mainly produced in Japan. Although there are news reports recently, Taiyuan Steel Group has produced domestic ball pen head, the news is encouraging, but the nib steel and "NIB ball bead" are two concepts, that is to say, tungsten carbide balls have not yet been made in China.
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